>Thank you, for this, Gavin Nicol. I never thought of that before. To me,
>the query part has been the URL (itself). The stuff in front of the query
>that advised the Net who could execute the query was a temporary aberration.
OK. This is one view of hypermedia, and I'll get into this later.
>If the program or the file which is the object of the query is local,
>there might sometimes be no reason to go outside the local network (provider).
>How many tools will no longer be able to hyperlink to a particular
>paragraph without queries. (I take it you mean a query to be the
>ANCHOR and the ARGUMENTS in a URL).
In fact, I do not mean these. When I say "query" I mean whatever
follows after the "?", and in particular, the results of a forms
submission.
Now, the kind of hypermedia viewpoint you are espousing is that in
fact, everything is a query. I see this as one viable approach. I
gather from your message that you use fragment specifiers a lot, or
perhaps queries (in my sense of the word). However, something like
http://foo.bar.com/myrdb?row=1
and
http://foo.bar.com/mybook?search=hypermedia+url+i18n;easy=as+pie
can, and, I believe, should, be treated differently. In the first case,
you have what is effectively a deterministic address, in the second
case you are dealing with user input. The addressing can be
accomplished in a number of different ways:
http://foo.bar.com/myrdb/1
for example. Such addresses can be written down.
In the case of user input, what is being sent to the server is
(and should be) transparent to the user. I argue that user input
should be treated as a seperate chunk of data, and a seperate *type*
of data. It is not an address.
There are cases, obviously, where people might go off, execute a
search, and find something interesting to pass along to a friend. In
such a case, some people would argue that you should be able to write
down the URL *including* the query. I disagree, and think that there
are better ways of accomplishing the same thing. In a reasonable
hypermedia system, you should be able to create, and name, a query link
that people can link to.